UKfast Relies on Bacula Backup and Data Recovery

“With Bacula’s solution, we experienced a significant turnaround in reliability. Thanks to its advanced architecture, Bacula has provided us with the ability to offer advanced services to all our clients”

Neil Lathwood, IT Director UKFast

The Challenge
UKFast invested considerable time and money with Veritas and Netvault. Initially progressing from performing simple file backups, the hosting provider increasingly looked for – and needed – more robust solutions. Backing up over two terabytes of data, early solutions struggled, increasingly, presenting the need for SQL-compatible and system state backups.

Veritas’ support service typically took an entire day to resolve many backup issues, and as UKFast’s infrastructure grew, it became increasingly clear that the Veritas system was not scaling adequately. In addition, issues with the Veritas Linux client brought further pain.

The Solution

A UKFast support engineer had meanwhile come to learn of the Bacula solution, and decided to give it a trial run in the labs. Initial performance looked good, and was followed by thorough tested in UKFast’s demanding hosting environment. “As positive results came through from the tests, we happily moved all our clients over to Bacula.” Lathwood explains.

“After implementation of Bacula, we experienced a significant turnaround in reliability. Today, with 105 Bacula servers online we trust the system with over 27 terabytes of UKFast client data which increases on a daily basis and plays a leading part in our backup solution. In total, we have 43.8 terabytes of backup space allocated out to clients, ready for use by Bacula.”

Results

UKFast Relies on Bacula Backup and Data Recovery. Lawrence Jones, Managing Director of UKFast is always looking for ways to add value for clients. “Our real strength lies in the ability to work closely with clients to create bespoke solutions that meet their everyday business needs.” Bacula’s flexibility means that UKFast can better exploit its existing hardware configurations, as well as now being able to offer its clients significantly increased customisation of backup services.

“Money has been saved, thanks to Bacula’s zero-cost licenses”, adds Lathwood. “UKFast now enjoys bigger hardware configurations, largely because the savings from license fees can be passed directly onto stronger hardware configurations. And with Bacula’s monitoring tools and console, we can log the backups used by our clients”.